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Ask HN: Founders, what is the worst experience you had with developers?

93 points by oldboyFX 8y ago

And how did you manage to solve the problem?

travelbuffoon 8y ago
Mine wanted to get paid. Can you imagine it? Building the best product ever just wasn't enough. P45's all round and the issue was solved, permanently.
- azhenley 8y ago
  For non-UK readers: according to Wikipedia, P45 is slang for firing an employee.
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    Thanks... so kind of like how we would say 'pink slip' in the US.
  - edwinbalani 8y ago
    Yep - in reality it's the number/code of the HMRC (tax authority) form you get when you leave a job.
  - alexbilbie 8y ago
    A P45 is the official document you receive when you leave employment (fired or not), it isn’t slang for anything though you may be threatened with a P45
    - azhenley 8y ago
      "The term is used in British slang as a metonym for termination of employment." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P45_(tax) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P45_(tax)
      - kurtisc 8y ago
        You seem to be telling someone who lives in London how British slang is used because you read about it a few minutes before on Wikipedia.
        quickthrower2 8y ago
        Fellow Brit here. Born, bred and then f'd off elsewhere. I'd argue P45 is slang for being fired. Its slang because P45 has nothing directly to do with being fired. It is a tax document related to changing employment.
        kurtisc 8y ago
        Something to do with acquiring a P45 as a noun, yes. P45 isn't itself a verb that means firing as I infer the OP to be saying.
        lewisflude 8y ago
        I agree (born and live in London). I've never heard P45 used as slang, maybe you could use "given a P45" to suggest someone was fired though.
- collyw 8y ago
  So you didn't pay them?
  - noobermin 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure this post is sarcastic.
    - collyw 8y ago
      Ahh I see now. Sarcasm isn't always obvious in text form.
choot 8y ago
1. Undocumented server setups with passwords saved in their own password manager and refusing to hand passwords and proccess after being fired. 2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data 3. Insulting the guy from the marketing/sales/customer service department for lack of technical knowledge. 4. Asking the woman from the customer service department to be a cheerleader to up his motivation while he fixed the customer's problem.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  > 2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data If true, that is a pretty easy prosecutable criminal offense. Did you press charges?
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  > 1. Undocumented server setups with passwords saved in their own password manager and refusing to hand passwords and proccess after being fired. That's as much a management issue as a developer one. There's no way the developer should have had sole power in the first place. I mean, I get it. In a previous life I was "the IT guy" with absolute control over my domain. But I'd have hoped most organisations would have wised up nowadays.
- rl3 8y ago
  >2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data May I ask what happened with this? For many companies step one would be to contact the feds, and then the former employee would awaken to the sound of their door being kicked in pursuant to a search warrant for all of their personal devices.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    Why is this a federal crime?
    - rl3 8y ago
      >Why is this a federal crime? Anything related to damaging computer systems via way of unauthorized (or even sometimes even authorized) access can easily become a federal crime. The CFAA[0] comes to mind, see 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A). Moreover, the feds are typically better equipped than local jurisdictions to handle computer-related crimes. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030 Note: IANAL
ajspencer 8y ago
Could someone explain to me why this question has gotten so many upvotes? Are bad experiences with developers common? My impression is that most of the time perceived bad experiences with developers comes from being a bad manager.
- brianwawok 8y ago
  No developers are often terrible. Source: developer
  - snek 8y ago
    s/developers/humans/
  - chrisper 8y ago
    I can't tell if there is a comma missing or you really mean that noone is terrible?
    - always_good 8y ago
      With the ubiquity of smartphone keyboards (I'm guessing), I've noticed a major trend toward zero punctuation, especially commas. You have to learn to just add them yourself, kind of like how a Javascript interpreter automatically inserts semicolons for you.
      - eftychis 8y ago
        However, comma placement can usually change the semantics of a sentence. Thus you can find yourself guessing the wrong meaning.
- gigatexal 8y ago
  This. People leave managers they don’t leave jobs. But... people can wear many hats but regardless of the hat can still be jerks.
- nemild 8y ago
poulsbohemian 8y ago
I had a boss once who conjectured that when you point a finger, there are three pointed back at yourself. I often come in to "rescue" projects after an initial developer or team, and more often than not I find just as many mistakes on the management side. For example - if the developer(s) have set up the production environment using their own personal AWS account, or set up DNS in their own name, yes, they screwed up, but that's the company's IP that management has failed to secure. Problems go both ways.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  If developers did that against original requests, that's a huge problem and the dev is at fault. If, as I've sometimes seen, the dev asks for credentials, and a founder doesn't do it, or continually ignores the requests, but pushes for 'get it live', falling back to personal credentials (with reimbursement or using a company card) is a not-unusual fallback. If, after it's done, requests for transfer to a 'company account' are not made, again, dev at fault. If requests are made, but not granted, owner's fault. I've seen multiple scenarios happen, and they've gone in all directions.
  - poulsbohemian 8y ago
    We operate in a completely unregulated environment, where anyone can hang out their shingle, calling themselves a software developer. For that matter, even our CS programs are not really training people for careers as software developers. Thus, there is a huge spectrum of training, experience, and talent in what constitutes software development. But, what I've witnessed is that as the "software is eating the world" mentality has taken off, in many companies responsibility for everything about the software has been delegated downward (shit rolls downhill) to developers who are not product managers, not security experts, not database experts, not really anything except <$lang> developers and then the company is surprised when in the absence of support and resources, they resort to just get it done techniques.
no1youknowz 8y ago
I have interacted with off-shore development teams from a specific country 3 times now. I'll say the country later. Every time the development team could not grasp what was required. You literally had to exchange 20 emails with them for each specific point. Of course, this just increased the length of time for scope and in all cases furthered the time of the project. Each stage of the application was over engineered to infinity. Spaghetti code everywhere and nonsensical functions, callbacks, literally everything was what the hell was the developer thinking. Of course it just about worked. They had to ship something, but it was slow. The UI was painted into a corner, in some cases doing the wrong thing literally crashed the browser because of an infinity loop or took too much memory. Some apps had about a billion dependencies and therefore could never be secure. I'm not kidding either, it's like the developer was a plumber instead of actually knowing how to code the simplest of things. There was no way to ever extend it to build atop newer features or have any sort of roadmap for user requests. In every single time, management outsourced and took the bid from the lowest priced company. How to solve the problem? Start from scratch with a competent local company with an actual design and development process. Want to know the best bit? One company I know of, who spent $6 million dollars on a project with an Indian company. An in-house developer took 3 months as a side project and rebuilt it from scratch. It ended up being the code from there on in. I have NIH syndrome due to seeing these issues pop-up time and time again. In my career I've seen well over $15-20m being wasted in projects due to management being completely incompetent and thinking sitting on the phone with a dev team will ensure success.
- mullr 8y ago
  > In every single time, management outsourced and took the bid from the lowest priced company. Turns out good engineers make good money. I've worked with some brilliant engineers from India-based consulting teams, and they were not cheap.
  - GFischer 8y ago
    I've worked with tremendously good Indian engineers as well. But in most cases they were already in the U.S. on some kind of visa, permanent residents or citizens. I have had good experiences with outsourcing in India itself as well, there are some serious teams there too. But there were some bad cases as well. Money is definitely an indicator of quality, expensive might not mean good but cheap almost always means they're not top talent.
rch 8y ago
I hate how whenever I ask them to attend more than two or three meetings a week they start showing up with competing offers. Now I let them invite me to meetings when they think I'll add value, usually by talking through the product roadmap and business metrics.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  The first line feels sarcastic, but the second one is as sensible as it can get. I'm confused :P
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  The workaround is to get a gang of people around a desk chatting with a line of code up. Its no longer a meeting, but you can slip in some "how we tracking on the deadlines" type questions.
Finbarr 8y ago
Was working with a developer through Upwork who claimed to be from Japan. Was in fact from China. Upwork terminated their account without warning, and we owed the individual money. Was a legal and logistical pain in the ass. I guess this is a bad experience with Upwork as much as with a developer.
- rboyd 8y ago
  I came into a project where I quickly realized the 2 upwork developers was just 1 dude who decided he could double his pay. Management was asleep at the wheel.
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    If a company does this its called "growth". An employee? "fraud".
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It's hard to know how to apply the appropriate 'grain of salt' when reading things like this thread. I worked for a small (~40 person) start-up before where there was rampant religious discrimination and inappropriate workplace behavior by executives, even the head of HR who functioned more like a culture gatekeeper to enforce the particular overt religious cultural aspects of the founder. When developers pushed back, they were called uncooperative, threatened with pay cuts or being fired, told they were not team players or were making too big a deal out of things. It was crazy! In my experience, the times when management believe they are suffering from a problem developer are actually reflections of the management. There are exceptions like employee theft, issues with employees after they are terminated, and these things are often pretty black and white. But for all the other types of things that are more subjective about effort or cultural fit or finger pointing or tone or attitude or whatever, I tend to think most employees are absolutely not the problem, rather it is inept management and extremely poor culture mandates.
- nemild 8y ago
  I disagree. Both sides can have issues, and it's not primarily the fault of "managers." You can see some issues that I list elsewhere in this thread. The part I do agree with is that responsibility to address the issues often is in management. I do wonder if every tribe thinks they're good, and it's the other side at fault? ... I think about this a lot in my media literacy work, where I explore the empathy gap: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Both sides can definitely have problems. But I think there are severe asymmetries at work, like what is chronicled in Moral Mazes. There is a big asymmetry about how managers and executives think the world is supposed to work for them, vs. what is a realistic compromise between complex teams that have to coordinate. Executive or management bad behavior can be hidden, papered over, politically rewritten, etc. etc., while executive opinions about the behavior of subordinates is often taken as unquestionably 'morally' right within the context of the morals and ethical systems that evolve inside a specific corporate hierarchy. I think as an abstract sociology problem, there is every reason to believe the dynamics of the situation make it far more likely to be problems with management or executives, and that it ought to require extraordinary evidence to overturn that prior point of view and instead believe it's sincerely an attitude / effort / tone / culture fit sort of problem on behalf of employees. This isn't really special to companies where employees are developers. It's just a general property of the phenomenon of a corporation, period.
frozenport 8y ago
We need a tool to convert a certain format to html, work flow required OCR and a few manual inspection items. An Indian outsourcing company took 2 months to finally setup the workflow. They'd be paid an initial fee, and every time we sent them a batch of file. They would stall on emails claiming national holidays. Memorable events included me needing to go through two levels of hierarchy before I was able to speak to a developer who knew how to change CSS or rather would change it. This is when I realized that Indian society is fuck. Whatever modicum of knowledge one of them processes they jealously guard from their peers. It seems the kind of "better then tho" caste system is preserved in the knowledge economy. To an outside observer this knowledge was what a 18 kid with any motivation could learn. I hired a Canadian (Also Indian) contractor to work with me to fully automate the system. We got done in 2 weeks and collected a substantial bonus. Our code is still in use a decade later.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
I find a lot of developers seriously lack a professional mentality (I think I'm guilty of this in my youth though I made up for it in dedication and sheer hard work.) Moving towards the business side I hired a lot of interns from commerce/marketing and they made my devs seem like little babies, it was shocking how capable, committed, team-oriented they were. It changed my view of things. It's a matter of culture and perspective, and of course the fact that there is definitely such a thing as 'bad management' ... but Engs do have a tendency to think they know what's best for the product roadmap, and have really strong views about all sorts of things. Some of this is good, in a way, but I really wish somehow the culture of development could be professionalized, both in terms of general approach to working at a company - but also in terms of the artisanal aspects of development itself. It's important to set tone and expecations early, with smaller units it might work ... but as Eng teams get big, then they always end up reporting to Eng and not product, so it really depends on the culture that the VP Eng / CTO has established.
- sridca 8y ago
  What are some specific (behavioral) examples of "lacking professional mentality"?
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    + A general disregard for any activity that isn't specifically development. Like 'meetings'. Of course meetings can be overdone, but they can have a lot of value even if the topic being discussed at any moment isn't hyper-relevant to the developer himself. There's a commenter below who said he has a dev who'll bring in competitive offers if he's asked to go to more than two meetings a week for example. This dev has his 'teamwork' hat on upside down. Sometimes you need teamwork to focus on hyper specific issues. It may seem wasteful often it's not. + A general disregard for the talents and value of other groups. (Funniest example: 'ice cream day' at work and these devs cam to sit by us just as we were sitting down and a dev sneers: "Ugh, marketing". We just laughed.) Eng. talent is more classically academic, and yes, marketing is full of fluff, but good marketing, operations, finance is really hard. Basically an intellectual condescension that bleeds into a lot of things. + Failing to internalize that ultimately, they work for a business. Sometimes that means doing a lot of things an Eng would never do, like bolt-ons or weird add-ons to address specific customer needs. Cringing around metrics or optimizations that are ROI oriented and maybe not perfectly suited to their vision of what a 'good product' should be. This one can be a real problem in terms of attitude ... because they can get rally angry and stuffy. It's almost an existential debate over who really 'owns' the product in a sense - the business, or the people 'making it'? It really bothers me sometimes the cynical take that many Engineers have in this area - because the presumption is that 'they know better' or 'it's their thing' but really it's not at all. Basically, their view of 'raison d'etre' is often upside down. It depends on the organization. + Engs without management experience have a disrespect for how hard management actually is ... more so than in other groups. Marketing specialists are generally not like that. + Getting caught up in ideological wars about architecture, or 'bike shedding' - we're all guilty of this, but it's funny how ridiculous and perverse this is when you step outside of it. We're 'building something' not making some kind of 'functional art'. As techies we all love 'new toys' so this one is more understandable. + On the business side, if I ask staffers to get something figured out, to give me a quick analysis, to make some slides for the Veep, if they are good, they'll nail it down and move forward. On the dev side, if they even move to it, I get a lot of academic prose as though they don't know the language of business. It's almost as though it's a little existential: so many on the business side play on 'sports teams' etc. are are very extroverted and team oriented, confident, and natural communicators. Often devs are not. So there's almost a natural cultural clash as well. You don't have to strongly convince or persuade team players. They don't have tidbits of antagonism, or 'special needs'. They show up early, bang stuff out, realize that the world is somewhat political, that nothing is perfect, that we have to bend for customers, we do 'what needs to be done'. Edit: hugely generalizing here. Everyone and every team is different. Re-reading it I make it seems like devs are this terrible bunch! Not at all, most of this is subtle, it's nuanced, it's not like we have gross dereliction, just some different patterns of culture and behaviour.
LaserToy 8y ago
I’m not a founder, but I think it is not about developers, but rather about personalities (read same things happen everywhere). So, for me the worst things I saw: Pure incompetence mixed with arrogance Bad temper - impossible to argue without getting yell at Chronically ignoring mission and goals (read like doing things they like vs what is needed) Slacking and lying about it Lying in general (work, travel, etc) Psychopathic beghaviours So, in all those cases, I believe, the only way is to say thank you and let go. And i’m IC
nwp 8y ago
I have worked in software for 20 years with numerous being very early stage ventures. I would say that most of the problems I’ve faced in software venture is with non-technical founders who, generally speaking, provide minimal value until product-market fit is achieved. This sounds like the kind of question I might have faced in those ventures. If it’s a software venture and the founder is not either a skilled designer, talented product manager, or a developer working very closely together, it’s very unlikely to succeed. Perhaps a better question is “Developers, what is the worst experience you have had with a non-technical founder?”
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Smirnoff 8y ago
Our Android developer silently inserted cryptocurrency mining code into the new release, pushed the clean version to github, but submitted the infected version to Google Play. After a few weeks Google caught that and banned our app. We lost thousands of customers and years of work and had to start over with a brand new app. Years later the infected app is still mining cryptocurrency because users ignore Google’s malware warning message and keep using the app. PS: I should have said “our FORMER Android developer.”
- amingilani 8y ago
  That is truly terrible! I hope you took legal action and are still garnishing that man's wages to this very day.
- abledon 8y ago
  Damn, I wonder what that kids childhood was like to form that kind of dishonest person.
jasonkester 8y ago
Developer attitude towards spending money on software... "Invented Here Syndrome" when it comes to the choice between writing 50 lines of code vs. pulling in 4mb of client side dependencies to use a giant 3rd party (yet Open Source and therefore Free!) library that incidentally offers a solution to the same problem, after about 50 lines of configuration. vs. "Not Invented Here Syndrome" for anything that involves paying money for anything. Such as that API that solves the exact problem that's blocking us from moving forward, offered by a company that does nothing but solve that problem for a living, because we might outgrow their Free Tier and therefore face potentially thousands of dollars of charges. Argued among half a dozen market-rate developers of a venture funded startup that could really do with having launched yesterday. Rather, let's pause to build our own version of that service first. Then build our product. I tend to notice these things while working as a consultant, and thus something of a bystander in terms of being able to do anything about it.
- laurentl 8y ago
  This. Developers often have a blind side to their own cost and will happily spend a week or more of their time (i.e. a few k$ at market rate) to shave $300 from an AWS bill.
  - ezekg 8y ago
    They should start a business. Then they’ll realize how valuable their time really is and that $100/mo won’t seem so bad. (Note: I’m an eng who used to enjoy reinventing the wheel.)
- tnolet 8y ago
  This is hilarious and completely nails a former coworker and engineering manager of mine. Morbidly afraid of paying $10 for any service.
PeOe 8y ago
We had a developer who worked on one of our projects. After he left, it was a disaster. Our new developers discovered that the names and items he used were strange and not related to what it should do. So the devs needed to go through all codes, figure out what it's doing and rename the code. It took a lot of time...

93 points by oldboyFX 8y ago

And how did you manage to solve the problem?

Mine wanted to get paid. Can you imagine it? Building the best product ever just wasn't enough. P45's all round and the issue was solved, permanently.

azhenley 8y ago
For non-UK readers: according to Wikipedia, P45 is slang for firing an employee.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  Thanks... so kind of like how we would say 'pink slip' in the US.
- edwinbalani 8y ago
  Yep - in reality it's the number/code of the HMRC (tax authority) form you get when you leave a job.
- alexbilbie 8y ago
  A P45 is the official document you receive when you leave employment (fired or not), it isn’t slang for anything though you may be threatened with a P45
  - azhenley 8y ago
    "The term is used in British slang as a metonym for termination of employment." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P45_(tax) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P45_(tax)
    - kurtisc 8y ago
      You seem to be telling someone who lives in London how British slang is used because you read about it a few minutes before on Wikipedia.
      - quickthrower2 8y ago
        Fellow Brit here. Born, bred and then f'd off elsewhere. I'd argue P45 is slang for being fired. Its slang because P45 has nothing directly to do with being fired. It is a tax document related to changing employment.
        kurtisc 8y ago
        Something to do with acquiring a P45 as a noun, yes. P45 isn't itself a verb that means firing as I infer the OP to be saying.
        lewisflude 8y ago
        I agree (born and live in London). I've never heard P45 used as slang, maybe you could use "given a P45" to suggest someone was fired though.
collyw 8y ago
So you didn't pay them?
- noobermin 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure this post is sarcastic.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Ahh I see now. Sarcasm isn't always obvious in text form.

choot 8y ago

1. Undocumented server setups with passwords saved in their own password manager and refusing to hand passwords and proccess after being fired. 2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data 3. Insulting the guy from the marketing/sales/customer service department for lack of technical knowledge. 4. Asking the woman from the customer service department to be a cheerleader to up his motivation while he fixed the customer's problem.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
> 2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data If true, that is a pretty easy prosecutable criminal offense. Did you press charges?
ChrisSD 8y ago
> 1. Undocumented server setups with passwords saved in their own password manager and refusing to hand passwords and proccess after being fired. That's as much a management issue as a developer one. There's no way the developer should have had sole power in the first place. I mean, I get it. In a previous life I was "the IT guy" with absolute control over my domain. But I'd have hoped most organisations would have wised up nowadays.
rl3 8y ago
>2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data May I ask what happened with this? For many companies step one would be to contact the feds, and then the former employee would awaken to the sound of their door being kicked in pursuant to a search warrant for all of their personal devices.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Why is this a federal crime?
  - rl3 8y ago
    >Why is this a federal crime? Anything related to damaging computer systems via way of unauthorized (or even sometimes even authorized) access can easily become a federal crime. The CFAA[0] comes to mind, see 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A). Moreover, the feds are typically better equipped than local jurisdictions to handle computer-related crimes. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030 Note: IANAL

ajspencer 8y ago

Could someone explain to me why this question has gotten so many upvotes? Are bad experiences with developers common? My impression is that most of the time perceived bad experiences with developers comes from being a bad manager.

brianwawok 8y ago
No developers are often terrible. Source: developer
- snek 8y ago
  s/developers/humans/
- chrisper 8y ago
  I can't tell if there is a comma missing or you really mean that noone is terrible?
  - always_good 8y ago
    With the ubiquity of smartphone keyboards (I'm guessing), I've noticed a major trend toward zero punctuation, especially commas. You have to learn to just add them yourself, kind of like how a Javascript interpreter automatically inserts semicolons for you.
    - eftychis 8y ago
      However, comma placement can usually change the semantics of a sentence. Thus you can find yourself guessing the wrong meaning.
gigatexal 8y ago
This. People leave managers they don’t leave jobs. But... people can wear many hats but regardless of the hat can still be jerks.
nemild 8y ago

poulsbohemian 8y ago

I had a boss once who conjectured that when you point a finger, there are three pointed back at yourself. I often come in to "rescue" projects after an initial developer or team, and more often than not I find just as many mistakes on the management side. For example - if the developer(s) have set up the production environment using their own personal AWS account, or set up DNS in their own name, yes, they screwed up, but that's the company's IP that management has failed to secure. Problems go both ways.

mgkimsal 8y ago
If developers did that against original requests, that's a huge problem and the dev is at fault. If, as I've sometimes seen, the dev asks for credentials, and a founder doesn't do it, or continually ignores the requests, but pushes for 'get it live', falling back to personal credentials (with reimbursement or using a company card) is a not-unusual fallback. If, after it's done, requests for transfer to a 'company account' are not made, again, dev at fault. If requests are made, but not granted, owner's fault. I've seen multiple scenarios happen, and they've gone in all directions.
- poulsbohemian 8y ago
  We operate in a completely unregulated environment, where anyone can hang out their shingle, calling themselves a software developer. For that matter, even our CS programs are not really training people for careers as software developers. Thus, there is a huge spectrum of training, experience, and talent in what constitutes software development. But, what I've witnessed is that as the "software is eating the world" mentality has taken off, in many companies responsibility for everything about the software has been delegated downward (shit rolls downhill) to developers who are not product managers, not security experts, not database experts, not really anything except <$lang> developers and then the company is surprised when in the absence of support and resources, they resort to just get it done techniques.

no1youknowz 8y ago

I have interacted with off-shore development teams from a specific country 3 times now. I'll say the country later. Every time the development team could not grasp what was required. You literally had to exchange 20 emails with them for each specific point. Of course, this just increased the length of time for scope and in all cases furthered the time of the project. Each stage of the application was over engineered to infinity. Spaghetti code everywhere and nonsensical functions, callbacks, literally everything was what the hell was the developer thinking. Of course it just about worked. They had to ship something, but it was slow. The UI was painted into a corner, in some cases doing the wrong thing literally crashed the browser because of an infinity loop or took too much memory. Some apps had about a billion dependencies and therefore could never be secure. I'm not kidding either, it's like the developer was a plumber instead of actually knowing how to code the simplest of things. There was no way to ever extend it to build atop newer features or have any sort of roadmap for user requests. In every single time, management outsourced and took the bid from the lowest priced company. How to solve the problem? Start from scratch with a competent local company with an actual design and development process. Want to know the best bit? One company I know of, who spent $6 million dollars on a project with an Indian company. An in-house developer took 3 months as a side project and rebuilt it from scratch. It ended up being the code from there on in. I have NIH syndrome due to seeing these issues pop-up time and time again. In my career I've seen well over $15-20m being wasted in projects due to management being completely incompetent and thinking sitting on the phone with a dev team will ensure success.

mullr 8y ago
> In every single time, management outsourced and took the bid from the lowest priced company. Turns out good engineers make good money. I've worked with some brilliant engineers from India-based consulting teams, and they were not cheap.
- GFischer 8y ago
  I've worked with tremendously good Indian engineers as well. But in most cases they were already in the U.S. on some kind of visa, permanent residents or citizens. I have had good experiences with outsourcing in India itself as well, there are some serious teams there too. But there were some bad cases as well. Money is definitely an indicator of quality, expensive might not mean good but cheap almost always means they're not top talent.

rch 8y ago

I hate how whenever I ask them to attend more than two or three meetings a week they start showing up with competing offers. Now I let them invite me to meetings when they think I'll add value, usually by talking through the product roadmap and business metrics.

seba_dos1 8y ago
The first line feels sarcastic, but the second one is as sensible as it can get. I'm confused :P
quickthrower2 8y ago
The workaround is to get a gang of people around a desk chatting with a line of code up. Its no longer a meeting, but you can slip in some "how we tracking on the deadlines" type questions.

Finbarr 8y ago

Was working with a developer through Upwork who claimed to be from Japan. Was in fact from China. Upwork terminated their account without warning, and we owed the individual money. Was a legal and logistical pain in the ass. I guess this is a bad experience with Upwork as much as with a developer.

rboyd 8y ago
I came into a project where I quickly realized the 2 upwork developers was just 1 dude who decided he could double his pay. Management was asleep at the wheel.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  If a company does this its called "growth". An employee? "fraud".

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

It's hard to know how to apply the appropriate 'grain of salt' when reading things like this thread. I worked for a small (~40 person) start-up before where there was rampant religious discrimination and inappropriate workplace behavior by executives, even the head of HR who functioned more like a culture gatekeeper to enforce the particular overt religious cultural aspects of the founder. When developers pushed back, they were called uncooperative, threatened with pay cuts or being fired, told they were not team players or were making too big a deal out of things. It was crazy! In my experience, the times when management believe they are suffering from a problem developer are actually reflections of the management. There are exceptions like employee theft, issues with employees after they are terminated, and these things are often pretty black and white. But for all the other types of things that are more subjective about effort or cultural fit or finger pointing or tone or attitude or whatever, I tend to think most employees are absolutely not the problem, rather it is inept management and extremely poor culture mandates.

nemild 8y ago
I disagree. Both sides can have issues, and it's not primarily the fault of "managers." You can see some issues that I list elsewhere in this thread. The part I do agree with is that responsibility to address the issues often is in management. I do wonder if every tribe thinks they're good, and it's the other side at fault? ... I think about this a lot in my media literacy work, where I explore the empathy gap: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Both sides can definitely have problems. But I think there are severe asymmetries at work, like what is chronicled in Moral Mazes. There is a big asymmetry about how managers and executives think the world is supposed to work for them, vs. what is a realistic compromise between complex teams that have to coordinate. Executive or management bad behavior can be hidden, papered over, politically rewritten, etc. etc., while executive opinions about the behavior of subordinates is often taken as unquestionably 'morally' right within the context of the morals and ethical systems that evolve inside a specific corporate hierarchy. I think as an abstract sociology problem, there is every reason to believe the dynamics of the situation make it far more likely to be problems with management or executives, and that it ought to require extraordinary evidence to overturn that prior point of view and instead believe it's sincerely an attitude / effort / tone / culture fit sort of problem on behalf of employees. This isn't really special to companies where employees are developers. It's just a general property of the phenomenon of a corporation, period.

frozenport 8y ago

We need a tool to convert a certain format to html, work flow required OCR and a few manual inspection items. An Indian outsourcing company took 2 months to finally setup the workflow. They'd be paid an initial fee, and every time we sent them a batch of file. They would stall on emails claiming national holidays. Memorable events included me needing to go through two levels of hierarchy before I was able to speak to a developer who knew how to change CSS or rather would change it. This is when I realized that Indian society is fuck. Whatever modicum of knowledge one of them processes they jealously guard from their peers. It seems the kind of "better then tho" caste system is preserved in the knowledge economy. To an outside observer this knowledge was what a 18 kid with any motivation could learn. I hired a Canadian (Also Indian) contractor to work with me to fully automate the system. We got done in 2 weeks and collected a substantial bonus. Our code is still in use a decade later.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

I find a lot of developers seriously lack a professional mentality (I think I'm guilty of this in my youth though I made up for it in dedication and sheer hard work.) Moving towards the business side I hired a lot of interns from commerce/marketing and they made my devs seem like little babies, it was shocking how capable, committed, team-oriented they were. It changed my view of things. It's a matter of culture and perspective, and of course the fact that there is definitely such a thing as 'bad management' ... but Engs do have a tendency to think they know what's best for the product roadmap, and have really strong views about all sorts of things. Some of this is good, in a way, but I really wish somehow the culture of development could be professionalized, both in terms of general approach to working at a company - but also in terms of the artisanal aspects of development itself. It's important to set tone and expecations early, with smaller units it might work ... but as Eng teams get big, then they always end up reporting to Eng and not product, so it really depends on the culture that the VP Eng / CTO has established.

sridca 8y ago
What are some specific (behavioral) examples of "lacking professional mentality"?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  + A general disregard for any activity that isn't specifically development. Like 'meetings'. Of course meetings can be overdone, but they can have a lot of value even if the topic being discussed at any moment isn't hyper-relevant to the developer himself. There's a commenter below who said he has a dev who'll bring in competitive offers if he's asked to go to more than two meetings a week for example. This dev has his 'teamwork' hat on upside down. Sometimes you need teamwork to focus on hyper specific issues. It may seem wasteful often it's not. + A general disregard for the talents and value of other groups. (Funniest example: 'ice cream day' at work and these devs cam to sit by us just as we were sitting down and a dev sneers: "Ugh, marketing". We just laughed.) Eng. talent is more classically academic, and yes, marketing is full of fluff, but good marketing, operations, finance is really hard. Basically an intellectual condescension that bleeds into a lot of things. + Failing to internalize that ultimately, they work for a business. Sometimes that means doing a lot of things an Eng would never do, like bolt-ons or weird add-ons to address specific customer needs. Cringing around metrics or optimizations that are ROI oriented and maybe not perfectly suited to their vision of what a 'good product' should be. This one can be a real problem in terms of attitude ... because they can get rally angry and stuffy. It's almost an existential debate over who really 'owns' the product in a sense - the business, or the people 'making it'? It really bothers me sometimes the cynical take that many Engineers have in this area - because the presumption is that 'they know better' or 'it's their thing' but really it's not at all. Basically, their view of 'raison d'etre' is often upside down. It depends on the organization. + Engs without management experience have a disrespect for how hard management actually is ... more so than in other groups. Marketing specialists are generally not like that. + Getting caught up in ideological wars about architecture, or 'bike shedding' - we're all guilty of this, but it's funny how ridiculous and perverse this is when you step outside of it. We're 'building something' not making some kind of 'functional art'. As techies we all love 'new toys' so this one is more understandable. + On the business side, if I ask staffers to get something figured out, to give me a quick analysis, to make some slides for the Veep, if they are good, they'll nail it down and move forward. On the dev side, if they even move to it, I get a lot of academic prose as though they don't know the language of business. It's almost as though it's a little existential: so many on the business side play on 'sports teams' etc. are are very extroverted and team oriented, confident, and natural communicators. Often devs are not. So there's almost a natural cultural clash as well. You don't have to strongly convince or persuade team players. They don't have tidbits of antagonism, or 'special needs'. They show up early, bang stuff out, realize that the world is somewhat political, that nothing is perfect, that we have to bend for customers, we do 'what needs to be done'. Edit: hugely generalizing here. Everyone and every team is different. Re-reading it I make it seems like devs are this terrible bunch! Not at all, most of this is subtle, it's nuanced, it's not like we have gross dereliction, just some different patterns of culture and behaviour.

LaserToy 8y ago

I’m not a founder, but I think it is not about developers, but rather about personalities (read same things happen everywhere). So, for me the worst things I saw: Pure incompetence mixed with arrogance Bad temper - impossible to argue without getting yell at Chronically ignoring mission and goals (read like doing things they like vs what is needed) Slacking and lying about it Lying in general (work, travel, etc) Psychopathic beghaviours So, in all those cases, I believe, the only way is to say thank you and let go. And i’m IC

nwp 8y ago

I have worked in software for 20 years with numerous being very early stage ventures. I would say that most of the problems I’ve faced in software venture is with non-technical founders who, generally speaking, provide minimal value until product-market fit is achieved. This sounds like the kind of question I might have faced in those ventures. If it’s a software venture and the founder is not either a skilled designer, talented product manager, or a developer working very closely together, it’s very unlikely to succeed. Perhaps a better question is “Developers, what is the worst experience you have had with a non-technical founder?”

deleted 8y ago
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Smirnoff 8y ago

Our Android developer silently inserted cryptocurrency mining code into the new release, pushed the clean version to github, but submitted the infected version to Google Play. After a few weeks Google caught that and banned our app. We lost thousands of customers and years of work and had to start over with a brand new app. Years later the infected app is still mining cryptocurrency because users ignore Google’s malware warning message and keep using the app. PS: I should have said “our FORMER Android developer.”

amingilani 8y ago
That is truly terrible! I hope you took legal action and are still garnishing that man's wages to this very day.
abledon 8y ago
Damn, I wonder what that kids childhood was like to form that kind of dishonest person.

jasonkester 8y ago

Developer attitude towards spending money on software... "Invented Here Syndrome" when it comes to the choice between writing 50 lines of code vs. pulling in 4mb of client side dependencies to use a giant 3rd party (yet Open Source and therefore Free!) library that incidentally offers a solution to the same problem, after about 50 lines of configuration. vs. "Not Invented Here Syndrome" for anything that involves paying money for anything. Such as that API that solves the exact problem that's blocking us from moving forward, offered by a company that does nothing but solve that problem for a living, because we might outgrow their Free Tier and therefore face potentially thousands of dollars of charges. Argued among half a dozen market-rate developers of a venture funded startup that could really do with having launched yesterday. Rather, let's pause to build our own version of that service first. Then build our product. I tend to notice these things while working as a consultant, and thus something of a bystander in terms of being able to do anything about it.

laurentl 8y ago
This. Developers often have a blind side to their own cost and will happily spend a week or more of their time (i.e. a few k$ at market rate) to shave $300 from an AWS bill.
- ezekg 8y ago
  They should start a business. Then they’ll realize how valuable their time really is and that $100/mo won’t seem so bad. (Note: I’m an eng who used to enjoy reinventing the wheel.)
tnolet 8y ago
This is hilarious and completely nails a former coworker and engineering manager of mine. Morbidly afraid of paying $10 for any service.

PeOe 8y ago

We had a developer who worked on one of our projects. After he left, it was a disaster. Our new developers discovered that the names and items he used were strange and not related to what it should do. So the devs needed to go through all codes, figure out what it's doing and rename the code. It took a lot of time...